Magento has had a long run with established NZ ecommerce businesses. Complex catalogues, multi-store setups, deep integrations. For a period, it was the right tool for serious ecommerce.
That period is largely over. Magento 1 reached end-of-life in June 2020. Magento 2 is still supported, but the maintenance overhead has become significant enough that many NZ businesses are paying for a platform relationship that gives them diminishing returns. Security patches require developer time. Performance is increasingly hard to maintain without ongoing investment. The ecosystem of extensions is fragmented. And the developer pool in NZ capable of maintaining a complex Magento instance is smaller than it used to be.
Most businesses on Magento today aren't staying out of preference. They're staying because the move looks hard.
It is hard. But so is staying.
What you're actually moving away from
Understanding the migration starts with understanding what Magento is holding for your business. In most cases: your product catalogue, your customer data, your order history, your integrations (ERP, accounting, 3PL, email platform), your URL structure and whatever custom logic has been built into the store over the years.
Each of those is a migration workstream, not just a data export.
The businesses that struggle with Magento exits tend to underestimate how much custom logic exists in their current setup. Years of workarounds, custom modules and integrations that no longer have clear documentation. The first phase of any serious Magento exit is discovery: mapping exactly what exists, what needs to move, what can be rebuilt on the new platform natively and what needs to be custom-built again.
Why lift-and-shift fails
The instinct for many businesses is to replicate what they have. Move the products, move the customers, rebuild the same features, go live. This is the most expensive way to do a migration, and it produces the worst outcome.
Magento's architecture is different from Shopify's. Trying to rebuild Magento logic inside Shopify produces stores that fight the platform rather than work with it. Custom modules that existed because Magento needed them to compensate for its own limitations often don't need to exist on Shopify at all. Rebuilding them anyway adds development cost and ongoing maintenance load for no commercial benefit.
The better approach treats the migration as a new build with data migration, not a copy-and-paste job. Start from your commercial requirements. What does the store need to do? What does the customer journey need to look like? Build that on Shopify or Shopify Plus, cleanly, and bring your data across to support it.
Advintage is a useful example. The website we built for them involved exiting Magento, migrating accounting systems and launching a Shopify build simultaneously. The complexity was real. The outcome was a store that actually works without ongoing developer dependency. Read the full story here.
The risks to manage
SEO continuity. If your Magento store has years of indexed URLs, changing the URL structure without a redirect map will damage your organic rankings. This is one of the most common and most avoidable migration mistakes. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect to its Shopify equivalent. If the site architecture is also changing, the redirect mapping takes time to do properly.
Data fidelity. Products migrate well if they're clean. Most Magento catalogues have years of accumulated inconsistency: attribute values that don't match across products, images stored in multiple formats and metafields that have been used differently over time. The data audit that precedes migration is usually where the most uncomfortable truths about the catalogue emerge.
Integration timing. If you're integrating with an ERP or accounting system, the integration build and the store build need to be sequenced correctly. Going live on Shopify with integrations in progress creates a period of manual reconciliation that can be operationally damaging for high-volume stores.
Downtime. A properly planned migration has a defined cutover window. Products and customers migrate in advance. The cutover window is used for final data sync, DNS change and integration switchover. Done correctly, the cutover window is measured in hours, not days. Done incorrectly, it stretches out and costs you orders.
Realistic timelines
A straightforward Magento exit to Shopify, with a catalogue of moderate complexity and standard integrations, takes four to six months from discovery to launch. A complex migration involving multiple storefronts, deep ERP integration and significant custom functionality takes longer.
The timeline is set by the complexity of what needs to work correctly, not by ambition about when to launch.
What NZ businesses consistently get wrong
Underestimating the data work. Not mapping redirects early enough. Starting integration conversations too late. And, most commonly, choosing a partner based on the lowest migration quote rather than the one most likely to get the integration architecture right.
A Magento exit is not a website project. It's a systems project that includes a website build. The distinction changes how you scope it, how you manage it and who you bring in to do it.
Our website migration service starts with the discovery work that most migration quotes skip. If you're planning a Magento exit, that's the right conversation to start with.
Ready to get off Magento properly? Let's talk about what your migration actually involves.
